Wedding anniversaries will always be significant, as it was
for my parent's fiftieth anniversary that my family was last united.
I felt so sad for them. All those years, and
just my sister, myself and a smattering of neighbours and acquaintances. How eagerly they
must have dreamed, in those frantic post war months, of a brave new better world, and I
steal the words deliberately.
How precious each squalling new bundle of life, like myself, who would fill the country
with a bright and strife-free future. And so they made a welfare state, that no -one would
go without, and they built loads of schools, cos there were so many of us. And they built
hospitals that you got treated in without paying. And it was the envy of the world.
But somewhere it all went wrong. Horribly.
As global communication increased, then neighbourhood broke down. As ethnic migrations
stormed across continents, then identity was challenged. And as mobility of labour became
the norm, then extended families dispersed, leaving the "nuclear family" and the
even more dysfunctional "one-parent family." What a cruel and ironic
misnomer!
Universal free education has its drawbacks too. How do you tell a bright 12 year old
that speaking two languages, doing algebra and learning the violin might just alienate him
slightly from his old man, for whom fiddle is something that gets you off work for a bit?
When my parents married, they would reasonably expect that the world would remain
substantially the same as it was then, just hopefully a bit more affluent. They would
imagine that their own children would marry and settle down within, perhaps, 5 miles
maximum.
How starkly their wedding anniversary brought home the reality. One child married and
five thousand miles away, and one distant just a few hundred, but with not the slightest
inclination to marry - ever, ever, ever.
Where now your universal child benefit, your family allowance, your cod-liver oil and
your national dried milk? What great new society do we represent, myself deep in the
kitchen period, and my sister in the bowels of Europe?
So I couldn't propose the toast to my parents at their anniversary. I couldn't stand up
and speak the words that sons are expected to at these things. Me, the practised orator of
glittering insincerity, who can, with the arch of an eyebrow, hold 500 in thrall,
could not say those few words that night. Because I knew the disappointment, and I knew
how tragically their hopes and dreams had been dashed.
And then a few weeks later, at her home in England, my mother suddenly died. On my
birthday, her real anniversary. And on New Year's Eve, her favourite night.
Her son was in Scotland, and her daughter in Spain.
